Protect and defend by Vince Flynn Read Free Book Online

certainly wasn’t worried about how they would haul the mess away. His objective was much simpler. He was going to blow out the main support columns between the fourth and second subfloors. The loss of structural integrity would set off a pancake effect, bringing the upper three floors crashing down on the roof of the final subfloor. All that weight, falling with such force, would snap the vertical steel beams at the bottom of the structure. The four floors would end up pressed together like a stack of pancakes. The entire centrifuge facility and reactor would be smashed into a radioactive mess.
    Shoshan limped down the hallway and checked his watch. He had just under thirty minutes to clear the facility. Done placing the devices, all he had to do was put his cart back in his storage room and get topside. Once the explosions started, he would move for the gate and slip out in the ensuing confusion. He opened the door to his storage room and pulled the cart inside. The windowless room had been his refuge for much of the last year. In the evenings when the facility was mostly empty, he would close the door and drop the façade of Moshen Norwrasteh the Iranian. Slowly, Adam Shoshan the Israeli would assert himself. What Shoshan came to realize was that the two men were not all that different.
    Those were the moments when he felt most conflicted. When he worried about the nice people he had met and what would happen to them when the attack came. Shoshan felt a pang of guilt over moving up the timetable. Headquarters had made it clear to him that they wanted the facility to be destroyed in the middle of the day. They wanted not only to obliterate the facility, they wanted to extinguish the scientific power behind Iran’s nuclear program. The more people working down in the labs when the bombs went off, the better.
    It was not a surprise to Shoshan when he received the order to create maximum damage. He was himself a hard man who had been forced to give orders that to some might seem heartless. Since receiving the directive, though, he had lain awake in bed nearly every night trying to figure out a way around it. He had met some very kind people during his time at the facility. There were a few hate-filled anti-Semites, to be sure, but most of the people were no different from his neighbors and colleagues back in Israel. It seemed wrong to him that they should have to die for following the orders of religious fanatics.
    Seeing Imad Mukhtar, though, had caused most of those reservations to simply vanish. There was perhaps no more vile man in the modern history of Israel. Mukhtar was the purveyor of suicide bombers, rocket attacks on civilians, and countless kidnappings. He had the blood of thousands of Israelis on his hands. As one of the founders of Hezbollah, he was hell-bent on the absolute destruction of the state of Israel and nothing less. The mere fact that he was visiting the facility confirmed Israel’s worst fears; that Iran would simply hand off one of their new bombs to a stateless terrorist group like Hezbollah. Catching the man at the facility so close to the appointed hour was simply too difficult to resist.
    Shoshan took a brief look around the room, pondering if there was anything worth taking. Sanitizing the place was not a concern. What little he had left was well concealed and would be destroyed by the explosion. Shoshan backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. As he headed for the elevator his thoughts turned to his friend Ali Omidifar. He’d come up with a plan to distract his friend and make sure he was out of the building when the bombs went off. He pushed the call button for the elevator and thought that it was the one humane thing he could do to help assuage his guilt over all the other people who would die.
    When the doors opened, he found himself standing face-to-face with Ali Farahani, the facility’s head of security. He looked frazzled and in a hurry. Shoshan guessed it had to do with